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Sunday, January 13, 2013

Kenya: what next?

A roadside stall in Nairobi selling signs

Towards the end of last year the company I
work for sent me to Kenya for two weeks. I had never been to Africa before and
my duty was to report on the various luxury lodges and game reserves that are
the bait which is used to attract wealthy visitors. Tourism is important to
Kenya, representing its second greatest way of earning foreign exchange after
agriculture, and any hint of trouble in that restive country has a knock-on
effect that is felt keenly by those managing the tills.

Despite my duty to my employer I also
wanted to get a glimpse of the real Kenya – the one that is never mentioned in
the glossy brochures and tour websites – and get an idea of where the country
is heading in the near future. The writer Paul Theroux once remarked that travel
writing, if it is decent, should be predictive in that it should give the
reader an idea of ‘what happens next’ after they have read the final page. I
can’t promise to match Theroux in style but here, for what it’s worth, is my
account of my Kenya visit.

Passing south from Italy over the
Mediterranean I looked down from my window seat aboard the jumbo I was on.
Snowy peaks gave way to the glittering sea, followed by the coastal cities of
north Africa and then … nothing. The Sahara seems limitless, even from 35,000
feet, and I could detect no marks left by human beings in its sandy immensity.
I counted five hours of flying before I saw any evidence of human life again,
and by that stage night had fallen and we had flown over Libya, Sudan and a
corner of Ethiopia. I was beginning to see what they called it the Dark
Continent.

Nairobi, when I landed, didn’t seem half as
bad as I had been led to believe. Everyone had warned me about the ‘insane’
traffic, but clearly they had never been to an Asian city. By contrast, Nairobi
seemed to be a low-rise and spread out city and the main traffic danger would
seem to be dying of boredom sitting in a traffic jam. I mentioned this to the
driver and he told me that the problem would soon be sorted as a new network of
roads was being built by the Chinese to ease the problem. They were also
building a new airport terminal, he added, with the old one being considered
dysfunctional and unbecoming of a country ‘whose time has come’.

I was taken to a swish colonial-style hotel
set in lush gardens somewhere near the city centre, and it was here that I got
my first taste of what it means to be an mzungu
(‘white person’ or, literally translated ‘one who roams aimlessly’) in Kenya.
At the entrance there was a metal detector portal which people entering the
hotel were walking through. As I made to do the same my arm was gently grabbed
and I was steered around it. “No sir, Europeans are VIPs in my country,” said
my driver. “This is for non-VIPs,” he added, which I took to mean ‘Kenyans’.

Over the next few days I got to know a bit
of Nairobi and visited the office of my company. My main impression was one of tight security. Practically every building that wasn’t a shack had a wall, a gate, a
guard or two and a coil of barbed wire. I was shown Kenya’s first Kentucky
Fried Chicken outlet, which was a matter of national pride, and even that was
heavily guarded.

‘I will take you to The Village,” said my
driver. A village in Nairobi? I imagined Maasai tribesmen and mud huts, but instead
it turned out to be a giant newly-inaugurated shopping mall and entertainment
complex with 150 different stores. This development and others like it, I was
soon to learn, was where Kenya was setting its sights. It was a familiar story
and one I had heard many times before. But if Kenya wanted to become ‘like
Europe’ as someone put it, then where was the money coming from? I would find
out later.

Instead of a shopping mall I asked to be
taken to a slum. Not just any slum, mind you, but the biggest in Nairobi.
Kibera, which means ‘the jungle’ in the Nubian language, is the second biggest
slum in Africa. My guide looked somewhat horrified that I wanted to go there
and tried to talk me out of it. When he could see that I really did want to go
there rather than The Village he went into a bit of a huff. “Why you want to go
there when it is full of bad people?” he asked plaintively.

The answer to that was that I wanted to see
how people managed to live in such challenging conditions. With the slew of
problems I consider are heading our way, I figured we in the industrialised world had better
stop looking at people living in slums as deserving of our charity, and instead
take a look at what they are actually doing to make life more bearable.

Official estimates of how many people were
living there were 170,000, packed into an area of indeterminate size. This,
however, was a lie according to the young man who took me around the maze of
streets, and he said there were more than a million people there. “Do you know
what NGO stands for?” he asked. I knew it was a trick question. “Nothing Gets
Organised,” he said, laughing as a couple of young white people walked past
with the name of their French aid organisation emblazoned on their crisp tee
shirts.

I had been warned that it was dangerous to
walk around Kibera, but I didn’t feel in any way threatened. On the contrary, young
children, of which there were many, would run up and touch my hand and then run
off again giggling. “They want to know what mzungu
skin feels like,” explained my guide, who had grown up in the slum and still lived
there. Adults, likewise, smiled and said 'jambo' as we passed.

The slum was like any other town in that it
had main roads with cars driving through, and a maze of side streets leading
off them. Where it differed from a ‘normal’ town was in the fact that the
ground everywhere was composed of mud saturated with plastic bags and detritus,
and all the buildings were composed of scrap wood and metal. Fetid open sewers
ran here and there and children swarmed around, playing with anything that it
was possible to play with. Nevertheless, there were shops and stores,
hairdressers, nyama choma (‘roast
meat’) stalls and jewellery makers. We went into one of the latter and met the
owner, who made jewellery and other artifacts out of discarded cow bones. These
he sawed into manageable pieces with a jigsaw and then carved into exquisite objets
d’art by hand. It was amazing what he could achieve with just a few resources
and a bag of discarded bones.

A typical street in Africa's second largest slum, Kibera

We also visited a woman who helped others with AIDS, of which there were many, to make soap and other useful things. She
gave me a rehearsed speech about self-sufficiency and dignity and afterwards I
bought some of the things they had made, handing over a few US dollars, which
is the de facto currency in Kenya for foreigners. We then went on to see a
medium sized concrete building which had been constructed as a communal toilet
block. The idea was simple and ingenious. One squatted down over a hole to do
one’s business, which went down into a huge vat where it bubbled away and
produced methane. This gas then came out of a pipe in the centre of the
building and could be used for heating water and cooking. Okay, so it probably
wouldn’t pass the strict hygiene standards of, say, Europe, but it did give the
residents a form of energy and collected disease-spreading waste at the same
time.

The slum is well known in that it was the
setting for some of the scenes in the film adaptation of John Le Carré’s novel The Constant Gardener. In that story, sinister
pharmacological firms used the powerless and poor slum-dwellers for
experiments. My guide seemed proud of the fact (that the film was made there)
but said the premise wasn’t true. Instead, he said, the big business here was
in adoption, with many families from the US and Europe coming here to adopt. “Last
year there were so many we arranged them into football teams and had a
tournament,” he said without irony.

Grinding bones to make jewellery in Kibera

We stood on a bluff overlooking the slum,
which spread organically like a pattern of tightly fitted metal shapes, and
across the valley we could see a brand new development of high rise flats.
These were, according to my host, new apartments that the slum dwellers were
supposed to be moving into. They were constructed with Chinese money (yes, there
they were again) at the behest of the government, which regarded Kibera as an
eyesore and an embarrassment.

The flats were, however, unoccupied and when I
asked why I was told that the monthly rent of 10 dollars was ‘too high’ for
anyone to be able to afford. And so they stand there, empty, as the numbers in
the slums steadily grow.

The new apartments in the distance were 'too expensive' at 10 dollars a month

Over the next couple of weeks I bore this
in mind as I travelled around the country, stopping off at places that in most
cases cost hundreds of dollars a night, and even a thousand in some places. My
driver began to realise that I was more interested in finding out about his
country than I was in singing the praises of luxury hotels, and relaxed accordingly. He told me about the tribal strife that was at the root of all politics
and therefore most of the problems of Kenya. The country, as it was inherited
from the British 50 years ago this year, comprises some 43 million people
divided between 40 tribes. Two rival but similar tribal groups control most of
the government and business, and politics is a ramshackle affair of
stitched-together allegiances, ideological loyalties and nationalistic bombast, all lubricated by money and bribes. In other
words, it’s a bit like the UK.

The thing that everyone I spoke to feared the
most was the upcoming election, scheduled for March 4. The last time the
country held a national election 1,500 people (at least) were killed in
violence and 600,000 driven from their homes, many of which were burned to the
ground. Already, the election process was in full swing when I visited, with
voter registration booths set up in even the most out-of-the-way areas. Rumour
had it that voters, may of whom are illiterate, would receive a two pound bag
of sugar or flour if they put their X in the right box Large hoardings stood beside
highways with pictures of be-suited politicians proclaiming their election promises:
‘Let’s get Kenya working’ and ‘School for every child’. So fearful was the
government of a repeat of the widespread anarchy that they were driving around
the handing out (Chinese gifted) motorbikes to local tribal chiefs as long as
they promised to use them to ‘spread the message of peace’ to their clan members.

But violence, as I was frequently reminded by
the Daily Nation, goes on all the time
in Kenya. During my visit the big news was that dozens of policemen had been
massacred in an ambush while trying to capture a group of cattle raiders in the
northern Samburu province. Yes, cattle rustling, it seems, is big business in
Kenya, although to the pastoral and nomadic Samburu it might seem more akin to
genocide. At the same time, the tribe is having its ancestral lands confiscated
by the government to make way for more safari reserves and a couple of American ‘wildlife NGOs’ are implicated in this.
The suspicion is that, as elsewhere, ‘backwards’ tribal people can be got rid
of, stuffed into cheaply-erected buildings and bullied off their land with
impunity if it interferes with the affairs of business or government - or an unholy alliance between the two.

A typical headline from the Daily Nation

Indeed, as I type these words, news has
just come of another massacre, with between 150-200 people dead, hacked by
machetes and shot with bullets, in the country’s southern Tana River Delta
area. What with the ethnic violence, the incursion of Al Qaeda into the
northern regions (and Zanzibar) and China’s slowly tightening grip on the
country, it’s a wonder that the standard rhetoric regarding the country is the incantation-like
‘moving towards prosperity’ meme. A few weeks before I left, John Michael Greer
on his Archdruid Report blog
published a fictional story about America losing its hegemonic grip entitled How
it could Happen. The opening chapters focused on a proxy war between
China and the US in east Africa over oil rights following a discovery in
Tanzania. With this story in my mind I was on the lookout for evidence of its
feasibility when I visited Kenya. I didn’t have to look far.

China, it seems, is getting Kenya into a
slowly-suffocating strangle hold. Huge infrastructure projects are taking place
around the country, with new trunk roads, highways, airports and port
facilities springing up wherever one looks. The projects have brought money and jobs to Kenya, and
everyone I spoke to said they were extremely grateful for them. When I asked
what China wanted in return most just shrugged and said that the Chinese simply
wanted to help them out. One ventured that Kenya would be sending some fish
back to China as thanks.

In Kenya everything seemed to be under construction

Only one person I met showed unease at
China’s presence. She said that oil had been discovered around Lake Turkana in
the north. The arid region is home to many nomadic tribes and is near the
border of Uganda, South Sudan and Ethiopia, and it can hardly be a coincidence
that the Chinese have built roads leading into that area. I drove along that
road one day, noting the endless stream of container trucks heading north. The
containers came up from Mombasa on the coast, Kenya’s main port. Soon, however,
they won’t have to go so far as China has picked the beautiful Swahili island
of Lamu – a UNESCO site – to build one of its String of
Pearls megaports.

My driver said the containers, many of
which had Chinese writing on them, contained equipment for exploration and
drilling. Someone else said that many of them were bound for South Sudan, which
is experiencing a sonic boom of an economic explosion. It’s also a lawless
place, he said having just spent two years working there, where a driving offence is likely to lead to an on-the-spot execution by the traffic police.
People go there, he said, and come back as millionaires after only a year or
two, if they make it out alive. Almost limitless wealth can be had from
extracting minerals and oil and the attendant building boom, which is why he
was there. “The government won’t let you take cash out from there, so people
buy gold bars and smuggle them out,” he added. Much of the wealth has ended up
in Kenya, hence the boom and the property bubble in Nairobi.

A container heading north from Mombasa

But there was also a human price to pay for
this boom. All along the route of the new road, new-born babies have been
found, many still alive, in rubbish dumps and garbage containers. Their
ethnicity is a mix of Asian and African, and as such they are considered
abominations and abandoned at birth to die. You don’t have to be especially
sleuth-like to link the dire poverty of the average African to the oil wealth
of the Chinese workers to figure out what is happening. Orphanages are
appearing along the route, hastily constructed from breezeblocks, to meet the
supply.

Which brings me onto the subject of aid and
NGOs. If there’s one thing that seemed to unite the people I met in Kenya –
both black and white – it was their distaste for, bordering on disgust of,
western aid agencies. They were haughty. They drove huge SUVs and ran over
villagers. They earned a fortune and do nothing. They were puppets of state
governments. Interferers. Racists. Neo-colonialists. You name it, nobody I met
who expressed an opinion had much positive to say about the likes of all those
aid agencies whose names we know so well.

But the main charge levelled at them was
that they had allowed marginal populations living on arid land to bloom into
millions of hungry mouths that were reliant on aid. Which is worse, they asked,
allowing a million people to starve in the short term, or creating the
conditions for tens of millions to starve in the long term?

The accusation was
that the agencies had created a dependency and thus held power over regional
governments. Somalia, which shares a long border with Kenya, was a case in point. It was colonialism by proxy, they said: Do what we say and give us
your oil and minerals or else we will turn off the food and you will starve. But
what happens when millions of disaffected people get angry with western ‘meddling’?
Does it make a difference that these are Islamic nations? The situation, from
what I was told, was ugly and getting uglier with every extra mouth that was
born.

I realise that, thus far, I haven’t painted
a particularly rosy picture of Kenya’s immediate future. Could it be that
Britain left behind a flawed design for the nation? It wouldn’t be the first
case. After all, the British managed to keep the country pacified with the liberal
use of machine guns and torture
chambers. But, strong as Kenya’s image is of itself as a nation, its geographical
position remains a major source of weakness. Given the extreme levels of
corruption that hobble the country, the Chinese interest in its resources, the
ongoing militarization and spread of radical Islam around its periphery, the base
tribal prejudices of the voters and the fading ability of its protector states –
the US and the UK – to project power – where now for Kenya?

Speaking of the US, who would have guessed
that America was building a huge web of bases across east Africa? The strategy
makers at the Pentagon seem to know exactly where the focus is shifting to in
geopolitical terms, as this Mother
Jones article points out. But what of America’s ability to project that
power in an era of unprecedented debt and political paralysis? A few years ago
would the Chinese have been able to make inroads into such a vital strategic
area unchallenged just as they are doing now? Again, How it could Happen looks prescient.

And what of its natural assets? Think of
Kenya and think of wildlife. On my trip I was lucky enough to go on a number of
game drives, and I’ll not soon forget hearing a hippo, seemingly right beside
my head, outside my tent in the middle of the night. Indeed, when it comes to wildlife and safaris you can believe all the hype: Kenya is an extraordinary destination if you want to see Africa's wild animals.

But the situation there appears no less
grim. Surging population growth (almost 3% a year), widespread land development and endemic poaching
are taking their toll. Not all of those Chinese shipping containers are heading
back home empty, some of them are full of ivory and rhino horns. The Kenyan
government can’t afford to lose its charismatic mega fauna – how else could it
justify 1,000 dollar a night hotel beds? – and so it is stepping up the battle
against poachers.

Some rhinos now have 24 hour armed guards,
and surveillance drones and internet snooping are now being employed to catch
the perpetrators. The Masai Mara, much to conservationists’ horror, is being ‘encroached
upon’ by the Maasai people themselves, who happen to be canny business people and have used their new found tourism money to get more of the one thing that
they equate with wealth: cows. But more cows, over time, leads to less lions
and elephants. This is great for the Maasai, who now watch Manchester United on
their television screens and are very big on Facebook, but bad news for the natural world in general.

'Wildlife' spotting in the Masai Mara

I was in the Masai Mara for a few days and
happened to visit an eco
camp near a Maasai village. It was here that Barack Obama had stayed in
2006, when he was a presidential candidate and was presumably getting in touch
with his Kenyan roots. I was shown the luxury tent he stayed in and I couldn’t
help but snap a picture of the impressive compost toilet that the future president
of the free world must have sat upon and contemplated the lovely scenery.

Barack Obama's compost throne

As a matter of fact, some of these lodges,
isolated as they are in remote locations, are models of self-sufficiency, with
solar panels, organic vegetable gardens, energy-free cooling methods and
construction based on using local natural materials. It is a pity, however,
that they charge so much to stay there as the logical conclusion that the
average Kenyan has already reached is that a safari is only for the wealthy
foreigner and not the average Kenyan; something that hungry and armed local
people will not forget when the tourists stop arriving in their chartered
planes. Today’s lions and hippos and impalas must seem like the playthings of
the rich and powerful. Edible playthings, that is.

So where does this leave the average
Kenyan? My fear is that they won’t be in for a pleasant ride. Everyone I met in
Kenya was pleasant and friendly, and it was in most cases a genuine warmth and
not just because I was a walking dollar sign. I’d love to believe that Kenyans
could all have comfortable lives and be free of war and disease and poverty and
all the other things that Oxfam says it is unfair to label Africa with, but to
do so would be to turn a blind eye to reality.

But for the time being, remember the date:
March 4 2013. That’s the date we will get to see whether Kenya can put aside
its tribal divisions and work at keeping itself as a fully functional nation
state in the 21st century.

Epilogue:
Theroux revisited

When it was time to leave Kenya I found myself
stranded for some hours in Nairobi Airport due to a technical problem with the
plane. I wandered around, trying to escape the incessant American TV evangelists
which seem to drone endlessly from every TV set in Kenya, and found a bookshop.
In it I picked up a copy of Paul Theroux’s latest novel The
Lower River, which concerns an American man who returns to the Africa
he thought he knew from his time with the Peace Corps during the Vietnam War
era.

It descends into a nightmare tale and,
without giving too much away, Theroux’s opinion of rural Africa is that it has
degenerated along with us. And one of the main causes of that degeneracy, he
seems to be saying, is the way we have abused and exploited it in the name of
religion, development, charity and all the rest of it. It was a powerful read
and a fitting end to my trip unstinting in its honesty. Read it and squirm.

19 comments:

Hi Jason. Thanks for the interesting write up of your visit. I see that Kenya's population in 1950 was 6 million so in the past 62 years it has gone up over 7 fold. It is projected to grow to 97 million by 2050. It would seem from those simple facts that the wildlife of Kenya will not last much longer in the face of all those new people looking to make a home for themselves and feed their families.

It was interesting to hear of potential oil developments in the northern kenyan rift valley. The rift valley that runs right up into Turkey is the main migration artery for millions of eurasian birds that winter in Africa. So its bad news for us too, the chinese have a fairly poor record when it comes to decimating migratory birds.

The only good news I can see is that because most of the country is on a highland plateaux sea level rise will have much less impact, accept on Lamu Island perhaps?

Hi Phil. Yes, the incidence of so-called human/wildlife conflict is getting much worse. They are fencing in a lot of the game reserves now, with obvious effects on migration routes. Really, if you look at a map of Kenya, it is mostly farmland for subsistence and cash crops (esp tea and coffee).

I could also have mentioned the disastrous flower growing industry I saw around Lake Naivasha in the Rift Valley. Here they are pumping large amounts of nitrates into the lake in order that we can have fresh flowers. I was told it was a boom industry providing mass employment, but the conditions the workers lived in looked lousy to me. Pretty awful stuff, if you ask me.

Kenya is going to change. It is not possible to save it all like a big nature preserve much as that is what should be done. Capitalism will destroy a way of life that has existed for centuries, maybe millenia. The animals are, to use the Empire's favorite words, "collateral damage".

China is not good, but would Kenyans prefer 'regime change' like in Iraq or Libya? Oil rigs are not army tanks, drones and expended nuclear munitions.

What a story you tell, sad and spell-binding at the same time. I love Paul Theroux's writing! Have you read his older book "Dark Star Safari"?Off-topic: your rss-feeders do not get updated on my computer. Is that something you could change?I left you a couple of comments underneath previous posts, did you see them?

Sensitively observed and beautifully written. As your first commentator noted, the primary issue is the sheer pressure of population. It's a similar situation in Ethiopia and Egypt, where the populations have risen from sustainable levels 100 years ago to 10 times those now. It's easy to look back on the armies of civilisers and health workers and see how they have created these problems, but prior to the publications of the 'Limits to Growth' how many people realised what problems we were building up for ourselves, and others? It is so sad that we are destroying so much of beauty, but we are all part of the problem. As our fossil fuel bounty is gradually squandered, populations will return to sustainable levels, but it will not be a lot of fun for the majority. RogerB

I've been saying for years, those big ag types here in the American Heartland, are perpetrating a slow genocide worse than any perpetrated against humanity before. Worse perhaps even than the Catholic Church prohibition against birth control. Or even the war machine.

Pretty clear now too, after Aaron Swartz, if you question BAU here in America and are in any way successful, you will be ruined, incarcerated indefinitely, or killed.

What's this about China building acontainer port in Lamu? Where would they put it? And security wise its a bit close to pirate central - obviously being a world heritage site counts for nothing - Edinburgh being a good example.

Great post... I think I am going to have to read Paul Theroux's Lower River. Still tracking your posts Jason - interesting reading.So you are moving back to Blighty.... I will follow with interest how you get on in Cornwall. Condolences on the passing of your father who I remember meeting a few times in Solihull all those years ago. I must have been one of your sensible friends in those days :)

I agree that the 'West' and others have corrupted Africa and upset many of the balances. I am fearful of the future - events in North Africa and the rise of militant islam will just add more fire to a toxic mix. I lived in Nigeria in the late 70s when my father was working as engineer on a dam and irrigation project(now defunct due to corruption, poor management and incompetence) in Northern Nigeria near Sokoto and I remember that when some of the Hausa tribe (Muslim) who worked on the project striked because of poor pay the Army (mostly from the south and christian) came and shot many of them dead just because they wanted a fair days pay. Here maybe are some the seeds of what we see today...